Melissa Diaz

Name: Melissa Diaz Gender: Female Age: 18 Grade: Twelfth School: Southridge Hobbies and Interests: She played violin from fifth grade until tenth, but has practiced less and less, as she has spent most of her time between a boyfriend, comic books, the swim team, and music. Her current job is a hostess at a local restaurant chain, and she occasionally spends time working at the comic book store for free. Very close to making the nerd trifecta, she also plays Magic the Gathering and is learning about Dungeons and Dragons. She spends obscene amounts of money to get good seats for concerts and shows, and frequents Shooters.

Appearance: She’s the girl that people don’t mess with, but not because of the way she looks. A quarter of an inch under 5’2”, not skinny, but not the Michelin man either; Melissa boasts her curves are the genetic fault of her half Puerto Rican heritage. She has soccer legs, well, from the obvious reason that she played for about three years, and kept the tone by swimming. Her eyes are large, and are hazel in color—to describe it more accurately, they get darker or lighter in shade depending on her attire, but tend to have a more bluish color, with brown near the pupil, and just a little bit of green around the outside. Her experiments with eye shadow guarantee that her eyes stand out, but lately she has been simplifying the makeup to just a bit of black eyeliner. Her button nose flattens a little when she smiles a toothy grin with her sort of thick lips, but that usually only happens after a substantial amount of caffeine.

More often than not, her hair is the most constant changing part of her appearance, but at the moment it’s a dark brown with reddish highlights, layered choppy past her shoulders. Because her hair is naturally curly, she spends at least half an hour taming, or if you will, burning the shit out of it, with a flat iron.

Her taste in music, and desire for functional as well as flirty clothing reflects her attire. Most time she’s in jeans, save for the uniform she wears at work, and it’s a cold day in hell that someone will ever catch her in a skirt. She has a pair of converse that she’s had since seventh grade, black with flames on them and oversized red shoelaces. Her tops range from band t’s, to wife beater looking tanks, and corsets.

Biography: No doubt everyone’s life is filled with laughter, tears, and just pure embarrassing moments, and this gal’s no exception. Melissa was born, unfortunately, a month overdue at the Doctor’s Hospital in Highland Beach to Cheryl and Daniel Diaz. The doctor in the delivery room, being a severe moron, ended up cutting Melissa’s infant forehead during the caesarean section, and she was given butterfly stitches on the day she was born. It’s a little tidbit that she likes to boast to her friends whenever they talk about dumb things that happened when they were little that got them hurt. Her mother stayed home for awhile after her birth, her father was a marine at the time, and went out on tour right after she had been born.

The next time her father saw her, only maybe a couple of weeks old, was a story her mother liked to tell fondly on trips to family gatherings up north. Melissa’s father loved dogs, but made a bad decision in getting one just as soon as she was born. Her mother, still recuperating from pregnancy, had her hands fairly full with a new baby and then a new puppy. As she was getting a couple of moments rest, three things happened. Melissa started to wail uncomfortably, the dog went nuts, and the someone knocked on the door. Cheryl, obviously choosing to see what was wrong with her daughter, found that she had made a very messy doodoo. Trying to manage the, quite literally, crap, Cheryl tried to frantically clean, while the person at the door kept a’knockin’. At her final wits with the dog crying and whimpering because it’d pissed on the floor, she finally made it to the door with her shit-stained child, and opened it.

She handed her then husband his daughter for only the second time in her life, as a crap covered mess.

When she was about two and a half, her younger sister Kayla was born, as a result of antibiotics ruining birth control effects. What would later become a pain in her ass had actually been joyful at the time, and she treated her younger sister like a treasured doll. At least, that’s what her parents told her as she grew older, and her sister went in a completely different direction personality wise. Another thing that she failed to remember, but was told about later on, was an incident that occurred when she was about three years old. After leaving a closet she had been playing in, she found she only got so far before finding out she was tethered to something inside. She had accidentally gotten caught by a fish hook, and had understandably freaked out. Her father, the only one there at the time, handled it badly. When her mother came home, she found her daughter badly bruised, but hook free. Melissa, though she can’t recall the incident, does retain a phobia of fishing hooks.

Her mother and father’s relationship was a rocky one, her father cheating on her multiple times, and it finally ended when Melissa was six. The final affair ended the marriage, and started a new relationship that would end up in a new marriage for her father. Melissa’s mother gained custody of her children, and kept the last name Diaz, much to the dismay of her ex-husband. For awhile, visitation was regular, but eventually her father went up north, and started a new family with his wife Laura. Contact was sketchy at best, with a couple of visits ending badly, and cut short. Eventually he moved to Massachusetts for two years, coming back to patch up the relationship with his daughters. Rocky start at best, it eventually got easier for Melissa to get over the initial betrayal, though she still to this day is sensitive to the sarcastic nature her father often adopts with her, though it is the same attitude she sometimes portrays herself.

After seeing her young half brothers, twins Matthew and Daniel Jr., so much older than she remembered, she felt she had to be a part of their lives. It broke her heart when she had seen them after so long, only for them to not even remember her. When she can, she loves to take them to parks, or to the pool, just to watch them play and get outside (which doesn’t happen often). The relationship with her step-mother has had its share of ups and downs, but has reached a pleasant plateau of silent annoyance on Melissa’s part. For fear of losing time with her brothers, she puts up with the woman’s antics.

Elementary school for Melissa proved a couple of things about her personality. She was quick to learn how to read, and learned well, though she had issues early on with completing homework she found annoying. When the divorce happened, she made herself cry on command during math lessons, so that she could play board games with the school counselor. That same teacher, as well as others, would tell Cheryl during conferences that her daughter had a very large problem respecting authority. In fact, the only teacher Melissa had come to respect, and even like, never let her out to see the light of day because of unfinished writing assignments. But the teacher had let her write, and often praised her abilities, which shaped her interest in becoming a teacher later in life. Melissa remembers that she was one of the taller kids in elementary, hitting puberty a week before her tenth birthday. The problem was, by the time she had stopped growing, at about sixth grade, everyone else sprouted.

She just thinks of her height as an advantage to some degree, at least now that she’s dating and all, preferring that the guy at least be taller than her.

Always being an early worm, she was pretty mature for her age, despite the occasional issues with her temper. She once smacked a guys face raw for calling her a whore, but was not reported, mainly because the guy lost quite a bit of face in front of some classmates, but the two ended up talking and working their issues out. Her honesty at times, and interest in music rather than conversation would tend to make people resent her indifference, but she found her niche with a group of kids that stayed pretty close until high school. There, she met a boy that she later, freshman year, lost her virginity to.

She’d like to say that she takes school seriously, but the issues with authority tend to still surface. Failing advanced placement classes, only scraping by with a C after passing the exams for college credit, she kept a little over a C+ average, but believes that in college she’ll enjoy the learning atmosphere more.

Her personality ranges from extrovert to introvert, depending on the amount of people involved in a gathering. Often blunt, honest, and sarcastic, many people shy away from her initially, but people that she has grown close enough to realize that her fierce loyalty is something to be valued. However, she’s also the person that people are scared to cross, because she holds people responsible for their maturity, and if they fail to be as honest, she will often cut them out of her life in a split second.

Advantages: She’s smart, and fairly athletic, plus a scrapper to the core. Her perception is rarely clouded by the wishy washy attitudes of her peers.

Disadvantages: Anxiety can cause her to have problems breathing, and she has to take tranquilizers to remedy it. That, and her sense of loyalty and morality may keep her from playing the game as others might.

Designated Number: Female no. 30 'The above biography is as written by Chase. No edits or alterations to the author's original work have been made.'

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Designated Weapon: Vial of Strychnine Poison Conclusions: We've had so many girls come into SOTF with similar personalities... and they've all left the same way. Will Melissa be any different and actually end up as our first female winner? Probably not, but it's wishful thinking!

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 * Melissa is a self-insert of her handler, Chase. She is also what could be considered the 'evolved' version of season one contestant Marie Zaid, who was also somewhat of a self-insert.

Threads
Below is a list of threads that contain Melissa, in chronological order.

V3:
 * Those Who Can't

Your Thoughts
''Whether you were a fellow handler in SOTF or just an avid reader of the site, we'd like to know what you thought about Melissa Diaz. What did you like, or dislike, about the character? Let us know here!''